Part 2 of 2
THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF PROPAGANDAPropaganda is usually conceived as a form of speech, text, or other audio or visual message created on behalf of an empowered interest in a way that not simply informs but to enjoins the receiver in a subordinate relationship of uncritical belief. Propaganda may be based on false or misleading information, or it may contain accurate information or both. The point of propaganda is not necessarily to deceive but rather to help internalize or reinforce in the receiver identification with the practical and policy outcomes of the institution or individual for which it was produced. For Hannah Arendt, propagandists view politics as a form of public relations in which citizens are reduced to audiences (Arendt 1972, 11). The economist Robert Brady wrote:
When these ideas and techniques are focused on the "sale of ideas," the net result may be summarized as forceful persuasion, via calculating doctrinal exegesis, of those potentially convertible social layers who are most apt to be won over to the rules of status at the lowest per capita cost, by articulate and ideologically ambidextrous spokesmen for those who have a special vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo (Brady 1943, 292).
The status quo refers to the power configuration of political and economic elites acting in coordination, for the most part without direct collusion, to maintain control through accumulation of wealth, the mobilization of public opinion - or what the leading journalist of his time, Walter Lippmann, called the "manufacture of [popular] consent" - and, when necessary, via the use of state repression and violence. Neoliberalism, introduced in the 1970s in response to the fiscal crisis of the state, smashes the assumptions of the benevolent state by eroding the protections of working people. Undertaking a vast redistribution of wealth, the neoliberal state requires a higher order of persuasion or diversion in order to undertake a further expansion of global capitalism and the principles of governance (legitimation) required for that purpose. Carnoy and Castells hold that under the neoliberal "network state":
Accumulation and domination are facilitated globally by co-national and supranational institutions. Legitimation and reproduction are ensured primarily by regional and local governments and NGOs .... Legitimation through decentralization and citizen participation in non-governmental organizations seems to be the new frontier of the state in the twenty-first century (Carnoy and Castells 2001, 14, 16).
It is not the case, as commonly presumed, that the role of the state withers away under neoliberalism. And as Ulrich Brand (2005) observes, not all state functions are relegated to the private sector. The state reserves for itself certain areas, including the use of military force, though even in the use of armed force, the United States has opted to subcontract much of its military assignment, even assassination and intelligence functions, as in Iraq, to private firms, such as Blackwater. Rather, the functions of the state become more clearly defined by the needs of highly mobile transnational capital, as its social welfare obligations are untethered and turned over to private and non-governmental agencies.
This is not true, however, for corporate welfare, which by the late 1990s amounted to $300 billion annually in subsidies and tax breaks, including taxpayer-funded corporate advertising of products overseas, such as Pillsbury muffins, Sunkist oranges, and McDonald's Chicken McNuggets (Derber 1998, 66, 157). In 2008-2009, Citigroup was bailed out by the federal government in the amount of$280 billion; Bank of America, $142.2 billion; $25 billion to the automobile industry; $180 billion to the AIG insurance corporation; $30 billion to the international investment bank of Bear Stearns; and $400 billion to the federally chartered mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (ProPublica 2009). The state's central role consists of the securing of unfettered opportunities and stable environments for capital expansion, not unlike the description that Marx and Engels gave of government: the "executive committee of the ruling class."
Since the Second World War, the propaganda operations of the state have become gradually subsumed by private enterprise. As one scholar notes: "Whereas governments were the universal object of propaganda agitation in the 1960s, today it is the corporations that to some extent have replaced them." And propaganda increasingly has gone global. "The radical dynamism of global free markets is seen as sandblasting the authenticity of cultures and demolishing traditional authority structures" (O'Shaughnessy 2004,146-147). Indeed, the free flow of western mass culture, together with local creolized and hybrid variants that plant commercialism more firmly in the vernacular, have made inroads in the developing and former socialist regions of the world and induced a conversion to Western style politicking and commercial and promotional techniques of electioneering.
Preceding capitalism, propaganda is historically associated with the Latin term propagate (propagare), referring to the cause of spreading the Christian faith during the Middle Ages, but it has been long used by state and commercial interests to support their materialist objectives, be it general approval of state behavior or the promotion of consumption. Effective promotion has much to do with the capacities and competencies for selling ideas or images as well as the social, cultural, and historic environment in which it is employed. As a Canadian business journal reported: "Politicians have become the ultimate consumer product. Just like a box of soap, a can of soup or a carton of cornflakes, they require marketing strategies, promotion campaigns and plenty of spin to grab that all-important market share" (Posner 1992). In politics, a U.S. senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, told the Democratic national convention in 2004: "there are those who are preparing to divide us - the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of 'anything goes'" (Washington Post 2004).
Commercial propaganda in the form of advertising, marketing, public relations, and common media practices, such as product placement and plugola (promoting network or parent company assets through subsidiary news or entertainment outlets), is intensifying the commodification of public culture. [7] The prevalence of commercial propaganda has set a standard for the political realm, if indeed the two can anymore be separated. As the scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, supra, has argued, liberal democratic states, compared to autocratic regimes, have a more compelling reason to employ propaganda in public information. Indeed, propaganda is far more pervasive (and sophisticated) in corporate democratic states than in dictatorships, precisely because the former more heavily rely on a mythology of popular empowerment (Chomsky and Mermet 2007). And in a society as stratified as the United States, the most class polarized of all the leading industrial states in fact, the need to promote the myth of democracy is all the more forceful.
Propaganda comes in several different formats in "capitalist democracies," and these include public relations, marketing, public diplomacy, [8] advertising, and other instruments of public opinion formation. Distraction from the realities of inequality and social injustice and the organizing of public spectacles is a principal utility of propaganda in countries, such as the United States, where violent methods of controlling the population are restricted (though reports suggest it has a high rate of police brutality, particularly directed against people of color). In other areas, where state and corporate actors feel compelled to respond to critical public attitudes about the concentration or conduct of power, their PR agents stage a solicitation of "public opinion" as a way of depicting established authority as responsive to the critical scrutiny of citizens, while, at the same time, demonstrating good will and organizing public consensus (Habermas 1991, 193-195). For Chomsky, propaganda uses in quasi-democratic capitalist states foster "necessary illusions" cultivated under elite administration for the maintenance of control of the social order. The electioneering process, in which two-thirds of campaign funds go to TV ads (Young 2004, 169) that emotionally batter would-be voters over nearly two years of unending sound bite propaganda and attack advertising, is central to the mode of social management. (See Sussman 2005). The visceral character of American electioneering can be viewed as a form of political Darwinism: the winner-take-all victor is the last candidate still standing - and ultimately dependent on those elite forces that brought her/him to the finish line - as voters lose all semblance of a citizenry. [9]
Even if there is no universal consensus on the meaning of democracy, most would agree that the minimalist threshold includes regular elections and referenda and full citizen enfranchisement. But this does not mean that where there are elections, there necessarily is democracy. Even repressive regimes employ elections as means of establishing state legitimacy. Where wealth is highly concentrated, as it is in the United States, the development of democracy is severely constrained, [10] necessitating greater uses of public persuasion or diversion to maintain the dominant ruling mythology. For the United States, the staging of elections in countries where it seeks regime change, serves as an entry point for intervention and the opportunity to use its superior propaganda (marketing, advertising, PR, branding, and the like) techniques to prevail in image-driven political campaigns. As one scholar notes: "By limiting the definition of' democracy' to a narrowly conceived political mechanism [elections], the concept is emptied of any policy outcomes on, and continuous deliberation of, public issues" (Lane 2009, 116).
In most cases, elections merely provide for a circulation of elites, not revolutionary change, popular empowerment, or even major reform. Elections allow the "outs" to recover power at some not-too-distant future. Political uprisings that force elections tend to quickly marginalize the populace from any real power sharing once the electoral event is completed. In the absence of dense participatory and deliberative structures and active social movements, elections largely serve as symbolic actions to create or maintain the structural organization of the state. Mainstream media treat elections as spectacles: "News about politics encourages a focus upon leaders, enemies, and problems as sources of hope and fear" (Edelman 1988, 120), hiding the social formations and ideologies behind the political discourse that they project.
THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF POLITICSA professionalization of politics has emerged within the discursive framework of modernization. This largely has displaced amateur (citizen) politics with a corporate version that is designed to encourage linkages between corporate consultants, public opinion pollsters, public relations specialists, speech writers, and lobbyists - who do political campaigning as "off-season" work - and their corporate clients, and political parties and candidates. Public relations specialists are employed to organize propaganda for state initiatives, often designed by conservative national-level interest groups or party functionaries simply to drain the resources of the public sector and labor unions and thereby weaken their capacity to deliver services or support Democratic Party candidates. Small states like Oregon, in which ballot initiatives are easy to create, are frequently used as PR testing grounds for anti-tax, culture-war, and property rights organizations (Galizio 2009). As electoral and party politics are turned into consultant-led exercises in branding and propaganda, citizens are deprived of rights of democratic deliberation and converted into spectators of political imagery, symbols, and rhetoric (Barber 2007, 205), all of which can be continually recycled into multiple resale formats, "infinitely recursive discourses" (Wernick 1991, 151), that strip away their original meaning and intent.
Although the Internet has become a significant source of political information, it remains, as of 2009, still far behind television in terms of the influence on citizen political education. And it is not clear how much the existence of the Internet has changed the majority of people's political information-seeking habits. Certainly, for those active voters who are inclined to seek alternative political analysis, it is a very helpful tool with much potential. Mainstream media and partisan political organizations have heavily migrated to online formats (which are largely unrestricted by McCain-Feingold legislative rules on campaign spending), but that doesn't mean they have converted to new ways of representing public policy issues. Thus, it is not apparent that the larger socializing institutions - schools, mainstream media, churches, and government - are redirecting people toward a critically democratic analysis of politics. Indeed, the Internet is an increasingly effective instrument for surveilling voters and targeting them for highly misleading propaganda, which became very obvious, for example, during the 2009 national health care debate. Many formerly enthusiastic supporters of the Obama presidential campaign, which relied to a greater extent than previous elections on the Internet, are now asking whether the candidate's rhetoric (e.g., "Change We Can Believe in") was much more than electioneering propaganda.
The seeming success of spin techniques in domestic politics [11] has encouraged their migration to foreign policy and often relies on the same personnel to carry out their promotional objectives (Sussman 2005). Foreign policy "public diplomacy" is now more fully embedded within the commercial, globalist, and "entrepreneurial" character of contemporary transnational capitalism. Ambassadorial assignments and overseas private electioneering consulting abroad are integrated with the larger goals of U.S. foreign policy, acting as instruments of political capital. The U.S. diplomat is conceived not as a servant of the public sector but more as an agent of the corporate sphere, collapsing the (traditional) distinction between diplomacy and public relations. The former director of University of Southern California's (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy aptly describes the role of the contemporary diplomat this way: "The territory? Cerebral. The currency? Ideas. The marketplace? Global. The diplomat? Part activist, part lobbyist, and part street-smart policy entrepreneur" (Fouts 2006, 22).
Elections, like wars, are the best ways of testing the efficacy of weapons (mass persuasion or mass destruction). American corporate-influenced political marketing and propaganda techniques are rapidly finding their way into European elections as well. Following the American example, politics is conducted not as an open debate and struggle over the allocation of resources but as a professionalized marketing campaign in which the public is disciplined as spectators and voters and through mostly elite civil society organizations in which "local geographical and cultural knowledge is eschewed in favour of a technical managerial approach implemented by "experts" (Jenkins 2005, 615-616). Dutch spin doctor, Jack de Vries, for example, adopted the "flip flopping" ("draaikont") theme employed against John Kerry in the 2004 American election against an opposition candidate, Wouter Bos, vying for prime minister in the 2006 general election in the Netherlands (Vuijst 2008b). British consultants have seen American elections, been impressed, and adopted their own "spin masters." And for his skillful deployment of propaganda, Barack Obama was voted by the nation's leading advertising journal as "Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008," beating out Apple Computer (Creamer 2008), a reflection of the nexus of business culture and politics.
Enlisted to the political sphere, commercially trained consultants have converted their information gathering and processing and promotional skills into the new electioneering techniques, developing analogous campaign management styles involving polling, spin doctoring, image management, media advertising, and opposition research. Engaged with business and private interest groups during "off-year" cycles, consultants "bring their assumptions, opinions, and tactics" to the political arena during election seasons. Paid political advertising on television and radio contributes over 42 percent of an average consulting firm's income. The largest share of their revenue for .political services comes from placing ads on television for which they are given hefty, typically 15 percent, commissions (Grossmann 2009).
Mainstream news outlets regularly turn to party spin specialists as "pundits" to provide highly partisan, charged media commentary, as if any notion of objectivity had been retired to the dustbin of professional journalism. The acceleration of professionalization and propaganda uses in politics is clearly linked to neoliberalism's deregulation and privatization doctrines and "to the harnessing of the revolution in communications" (Osgood 2001). For members of Congress, the first staff hired are pollsters, media consultants, and fundraisers, in that order, reflecting the symbiotic interests and coordination among the campaign image-making professionals, mainstream media, corporate. backers, and politicians. The polled opinion of consultants themselves is that the most important aspect of campaign success is getting the message right, and political advertising, particularly via television, is the first line of battle in the manipulation of the public's attitudes (Kinsey 1999, 116- 118),12 Polling is not about listening to voters as much as testing political messages for their persuasive effectiveness. Unlike politicians whose main criterion for success is getting the most votes, the "consultants generate more revenue primarily by having their client spend the most money on their campaign" and in instigating longer campaign seasons (Grossmann 2009). In non-election years, the political promotional work of many consultants is offered to interest groups involved in legislative battles and in overseas political campaigns (Sussman 2005, Chapter 5).
The private consulting industry, which in recent years has grown by leaps and bounds (Grossmann 2009), is a vehicle for integrating corporate business culture with political discourse, which, like quarterly earnings reports, focuses more on who's ahead than what's being produced. Aided by digital information storage, production, and transmission capacities and with expanded telecommunications delivery systems, the consultants' powers of persuasion have been magnified. Neoconservatives and liberals alike have some of the most influential spin masters at their disposal, people like Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, Bill Bennett, and the lineup of pundits on the Fox News network and numerous right-wing syndicated radio programs coordinating one ideological stream and Arianna Huffington, Paul Begala, James Carville, and Air-America radio serving as titular heads of the liberal blogosphere. The left is marginally represented. (Amy Goodman is the best example.) As an echo chamber for the parties, pundits make careers out of sensationalizing and trivializing politics to ever more banal levels - occasionally dealing with matters of substance but typically with the same shallowness and manipulations of "reality TV" Mainstream media industries have a particularly tight relationship with the consulting industry, as paid political advertising represents a large share of the former's revenue stream. As broadcasting news coverage of issues has steadily declined over the years, political advertising expenditures have rapidly gone up - costs which directly and indirectly are paid for by the public at large.
Beyond political advertising and punditry in broadcasting, political promotion is also embedded in the types of partisan "news" formats that exist in commercial radio and television; the more sophisticated types of leaflets, brochures, and placards; photo opportunities; direct mail; telemarketing; websites, blogging, and twitter; opposition research, polling, and focus groups (designed for public speeches and other propaganda outlets); in some countries, text messaging (SMS); and other forms of broadly distributed communication. The country that most closely resembles the United States as a merchandizing culture, Britain, comes in second on this measure. In Britain, as in the United States, "[t]erms such as 'image makers' and 'spin doctors' are now part of the popular electoral lexicon" (Wring 1999, 45). The now conventional staging of campaigns is crafted to produce a personalistic drama, a contest between individuals, rather than conflict among organized interests and institutions vying for control of the policy and administrative process. The gaze of the television camera hides most of what occurs in camera.
Professionalization of politics is thus tied to the technification of political processes, which transforms political engagement from organic community and street- and plaza-oriented events and social movements into stage-managed symbolic events, such as prepared speeches delivered on special occasions (themselves symbolically constructed), big money election extravaganzas, the crafting of daily briefings to the obedient media, and in some countries professionally organized public "protests." The restraints on popular active participation by marginalizing citizens into spectators and "consumers" of politics reconsolidate elite and corporate control of the policy and administrative process, a privilege happily paid for by organized wealth as simply a cost of doing business. Even in the case of the relatively activist orientation of the Obama campaign, no major structural change (health, education, housing, energy, environment) was offered to the public once he took office (at least through 2009). The system of professional management and corporate control of politics has shown to work so well in keeping an alienated American public at bay that European elites, east and west, have established their own creolized political-industrial-media complexes.
PROPAGANDA IN DOMESTIC POLICYSince Rush Limbaugh developed a mass national following in the early 1990s with syndicated talk radio, the uses of mass media as a political propaganda tool have become more widespread. One of the earliest, though ultimately discredited, radio voices was the pro-fascist Catholic priest, Charles Coughlin, who had an audience estimated in the millions. The beginning of the Second World War was the coup de grace for his brand of public persuasion but not the end of broadcast propaganda. Following the 2008 election, failed Republican presidential campaigners, began to flock to the next best "bully pulpit" - talk radio. As a result of the Republican debacle in both the presidential and Congressional campaigns that year, Limbaugh became de facto ideological leader of the party, and even the head of the Republican National Committee felt compelled to apologize to the radio commentator for his momentary lapse in challenging that status (Nagourney 2009).
A month after the election, Republican campaigners Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee accepted positions as syndicated radio talk hosts. The notorious television talk show host, Jerry Springer, had earlier been mayor of Cincinnati. Local radio host Ed Koch was mayor of New York City. Others include former New York governor Mario Cuomo, former San Diego mayor Roger Hedgecock, former U.S. House representative Robert Dornan, former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, and U.S. Senate contender Oliver North. Jesse "the body" Ventura, who parlayed his fame as a professional wrestler into the governorship of Minnesota later had his own political commentary TV show on MSNBC.
It was rumored that after her defeat as vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin was also considering doing a television or talk radio program. Evangelist Pat Robertson returned to his "700 Club" TV religious talk show after making a run for the presidency in 1988. Defeated as a U.S. Senate candidate, Christine Whitman moved to talk radio before becoming governor of New Jersey. Ross Perot guest hosted the "Larry King Live" program between two presidential campaigns. Numerous other political figures, former cabinet and public administration members, political consultants, and aides to politicians also have joined the ranks of talk show hosts (Davis and Owen 1998, 56-65). The large majority of politician-turned- media propagandists are conservative. As political promoters, they joined the 30,000 political consultants in the United States, who enjoyed an estimated turnover in 2008 of $7 billion (Vuijst 2008c).
Candidates for high public office must not only be policy specialists or good orators, they must also have some degree of celebrity cachet. Hence, the regular appearance of presidential or congressional candidates on late-night TV entertainment programs. Like much of the popular culture, including the mainstream media, politics has thus taken on a more tabloid character. Anticipating the growing links between media and politics, U.S. Office of War Information director Elmer Davis once commented: "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most men's [sic] minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture" (cited in Nunberg 2004).
Table 1.1 Top 10 Advertisers in the United States, 2008
Source: TNS Media Intelligence, 2009
Data do not include free-standing inserts, house ads (plugola), or public service advertising.The intensity of promotional culture in the United States is evident in the data. It is first in the world in the percentage of GDP that goes to advertising (Wring 1999, 43). (See Table 1.1 for the top corporations' advertising expenditures.) Its total in-country advertising expenditures in 2007, even with a downturn from the previous year, was, according to one estimate, $285.1 billion (Elliott 2008). This was greater, based on World Bank data, than the GDP of all but 36 other countries in the world, including all but three of the countries (Russia, Poland, Ukraine) in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Of the $25.5 trillion generated in total economic activity in the United States in 2005, $5.2 trillion derived from advertising (National Association of Newspapers 2007). In 2000, there were some 1,600 companies in the United States that defined themselves as public relations firms, with about 150,000 practitioners identifying as PR professionals (Campbell 2002, 431-432).
The political sphere is likewise grounded in promotional tactics. Political campaign managers, drawn from the ranks of the advertising, marketing, lobbying, and polling professions, treat voters more as audio/visual consumer data than as activated citizens. Despite the low grade quality of American democracy, the term still strongly resonates as a concept with the public, as it does with other publics. It is a tribute of sorts to the democratic values of most people that politicians feel compelled to explain their policies in the language of democracy. In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, G. W. Bush used the term (singular and plural) 49 times (Sorensen 2003). But within the neoliberal economy, democracy is more procedural than distributive in character, as citizens are increasingly stratified by ever deeper divisions of class and mobility. The United States is indeed the most class polarized of all the leading industrial states. Elections by themselves do not confirm the existence of a democratic state. In the United States, they have become, in fact, professionally organized exercises in intra-elite circulation, and it is largely wealthy individuals and corporations who are permitted to purchase access to public officials and policy, for them a price well worth paying.
Under neoliberalism, states are expected to submit formerly public tasks to the private sector, resulting in a commercialization of politics. Voters, meanwhile, are increasingly commodified, assuming the role of spectators and consumers of politics - a relationship to elites that enables propaganda to work. "Today, the ideology of consumerism functions to conflate the concepts of consumption and citizenship and capitalism and democracy, as if consumption offered a resolution to social and political struggles" (Jubas 2007, 251). Actual voting, as opposed to its fetishized representation (which encourages a false validation of popular will), is not with ballots but with dollars. Voters determine the outcome only in the last instance. By then, those who even bother for the most part have been processed by the mainstream media into legitimating candidates and parties for which the majority have little basis for connecting to their intrinsic interests.
PROPAGANDA IN THE SERVICE OF FOREIGN POLICYPublic understandings of foreign policy are more easily manipulated by the state than those of domestic or local affairs. This can be explained, I would offer, by a proximity theory of state deception. Walter Lippmann wrote: "In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event" (Lippmann 1922, 43). That is, information that is more proximate and thereby accessible to citizens is harder to reconstruct and distort than news from distant shores that few people have a direct way of confirming. Conflicts in Third World and other less developed countries, such as in Eastern Europe, are laboratories for propaganda, which may be an important reason, apart from the asymmetries of power and the lure of their primary resources, they have been the most regular objects of U.S. intervention. From a Gramscian perspective, it is more desirable to internalize, rather than coerce, the standards of politics in a subject population. U.S. political practices have found their way into the campaign styles of Eastern European politicians (Kiss 2005), no doubt influenced by the steady presence of American political consultants and NGOs in the region. (See Chapter 4.)
Confident of the political utilities of propaganda, the G. W. Bush administration put renewed emphasis on selectively pushing a "democracy" agenda in U.S. relations with the former Soviet-allied states. In U.S. "realist" foreign policy thinking, the use of the expression "democracy promotion" does not necessarily correspond to the conception of democracy as a dense participatory structure, that is, popular democracy. Indeed, it has been argued that its locution in "democracy promotion" is in the main ideological in purpose, and it is rather absurd that the Bush regime, with its chronic disregard for constitutional principles and protections, would presume to take leadership of a global democracy campaign. It is of course a cynical exercise in propaganda. The employment of a popular term like democracy is intended to convey high-minded intentions that disguise the more prosaic interests of the state, such as expanded market opportunities, especially for allies of the regime, and its broader strategy of maintaining a Pax Americana throughout the world. Compared to U.S. initiatives toward the economic restructuring of the former socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, those dedicated to civic engagement in fact have been extremely limited.
William Robinson sees the U.S. government's use of the term "democracy" to actually mean polyarchy. This, he suggests, is about the building and preservation of elite interest groups in society carried out in the name of democracy but having the effect of institutionalizing inequality (Robinson 1996a, 626). The Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (see Chapter 2 and infra) was created in 1983 precisely, he says, to introduce polyarchy to societies formerly governed by centralized statist regimes. The issue of who actually wields power once polyarchy is introduced in such "low-intensity democracies" is simply overlooked (Robinson 1996a).
The Reagan administration determined that U.S. status had waned under Carter and that it was time to restore the global position of American power and demolish the Soviet state: "It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history .... [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism/Leninism on the ash heap of history" (Reagan's speech to the British Parliament in 1982). A mythological product of media construction himself, Reagan supported a series of propaganda operations abroad (see Chapters 2 and 3) that involved collaboration among foreign policy actors, professional consultants, the mainstream media, academics acting in concert with government, and a broad range of "public diplomacy" efforts in the service of the state.
Propaganda became a staple of American foreign policy. In 1983, CIA director William Casey was asked by President Reagan to initiate a public diplomacy operation, characterized as ''America's first peace-time propaganda ministry" and designed to keep Congress, the press, and the electorate in tow with the foreign policy line developed by the State Department and National Security Council. Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy was shut down in 1988, when the Comptroller General found that it had "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and public to support Administration Latin American policies" (Stauber and Rampton 1995, 162, 167). But propaganda continued during and after the Reagan years.
In 2005, the US. relief effort for the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia was conceived within the ranks of government less as a humanitarian gesture and more essentially as an example of "successful public diplomacy." It was seen as changing the image of the United States government as a correction of the prevailing negative foreign opinion toward "Brand America" (Fouts 2006, 15, 17). A 2006 report of pollsters, politicians, and academics, sponsored by USC's Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School of Communication and the Pew Research Center, defined public diplomacy as image building, designed for the purpose of helping to improve "negative public opinion abroad" toward the United States. Critical to this task is "the importance of identifying elite opinion when conducting polling research," which is taken "as a barometer of a broader public opinion." And business leaders are seen as "an under-utilized group of opinion leaders, which could potentially play an important role in public diplomacy initiatives" (Fouts 2006, 8, 11).
Although those who engage in public diplomacy do not necessarily support US. militarist tactics, such as those undertaken by the Bush administration in Iraq, they nonetheless do associate themselves with state interests. Foreign negative opinion of the United States as it exists is directed largely against the state, not American citizens per se. It thus makes the term "public diplomacy" rather ambiguous inasmuch as the public is normally conceived in democratic societies as independent of the state. According to one contributor to the USC study, "The Voice of America, Radio Sawa, Radio Marti, and the activities of the US. Information Service, and some CIA activities are all part of American public diplomacy." All of them are propaganda organs of the state (Taylor 2006, 48). Public diplomacy is therefore state propaganda, indeed the most essential form of state propaganda.
The use of the term ''American,'' as in ''American public diplomacy," which normally refers to the people and culture of the United States, not the government per se, is treated as identical with state interests and behavior. Such an idea of conflating state and culture is more typical of fascist states, not democracies. Public diplomacy is said to represent a form of "soft power," which can be understood as the pacification underside of a more aggressive foreign policy. In January 1983, anticipating the purpose and structure of the NED, President Reagan signed a secret National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled "Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security," which designated public diplomacy as a formal instrument of state propaganda.
Public diplomacy was then conceived as "comprised of those actions of the US. Government designed to generate support for our national security objectives." As part of the new propaganda apparatus, an "International Information Committee" was created to administer assistance to foreign governments and private groups "to encourage the growth of democratic political institutions and practices" consistent with strategic US. global interests, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union and its allied states. According to the Reagan government's plan:
This will require close collaboration with other foreign policy efforts - diplomatic, economic, military - as well as a close relationship with those sectors of the American society - labor, business, universities, philanthropy, political parties, press - that are or could be more engaged in parallel efforts overseas .... [in] programs and strategies designed to counter totalitarian ideologies and aggressive political action moves undertaken by the Soviet Union or Soviet surrogates (US. White House 1983).
Under the Directive, a "public affairs committee" was formed to take over the business of an internationally-focused "Project Truth Policy Group" (subsequently folded into "Project Democracy"), which "detailed plans to pay for the operation by 'harnessing financial resources from a coalition of wealthy individuals' ... U. S. defense contractors and private foundations." The committee was run by a former CIA propaganda specialist, Walter Raymond, Jr., working inside the National Security Council "to manage both the domestic and foreign 'public diplomacy' campaigns aimed at the American public, the media and Congress." Raymond "ran domestic public diplomacy much the same way he would have organized a CIA propaganda operation against a target nation" (Binion 2001, quoting Robert Parry). Parry, a Newsweek and Associated Press correspondent during the Reagan years, found "that a May 5, 1983 'public diplomacy strategy paper' discussed ways to 'correct' public opinion of those opposing the Reagan administration's support for the covert war in Nicaragua." According to Parry, "[t]he project's key operatives developed propaganda 'themes,' selected 'hot buttons' to excite the American people, cultivated pliable journalists who would cooperate, and bullied reporters who wouldn't go along" (Binion 2001). Raymond resigned his CIA post in order to take on this assignment. But clearly his training in CIA "psyops" (psychological operations) was integral to the task at hand (Parry 2004, 220, 224).
MARKETING THE STATESince Reagan, propaganda has become far more privatized than in the past. To rephrase football coach Vince Lombardi's famous aphorism, image isn't everything - it's the only thing. And nowadays that's not just a creed for celebrities or business corporations, but also for entire nation states, which PR firms handle as "accounts," little different than Anheuser Busch or MatteI. South Korea has a presidential council on nation branding. Wally Olins, a recognized specialist in nation branding, says: "branding is propaganda ... what it boils down to is manipulation and seduction. That's the business we're in. That's the business of life" (cited in Jansen 2008, 135).
Simon Anholt, a British journal editor and international marketing adviser, provides an indexing service for foreign governments that he calls "nation branding," which he defines as "the business of applying corporate marketing theory to countries" (Teslik 2007). None of the main countries featured in this study (Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine) made it to Anholt's 2008 index of the. top 50 branded countries. Ernst and Young, one of the largest global accounting and auditing firms, conducts "attractiveness surveys" for CEE countries to measure how well they appeal to potential transnational corporate investors. That is to say, countries must take their business-friendly image seriously lest they disappear from the world map of General Motors, Intel, BP, Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and other iconic citizens in the TNC community.
As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, transnational capital brings to the world the "heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls." They were referring to commodities and hadn't conceptualized the crucial function of promotion in commodity production and circulation. Since the spate of "color revolutions," branding and place marketing have become important concerns of CEE state policy, particularly focused on attracting tourism, trade, and foreign investment. In the Czech Republic, for example, this effort is conducted by "a group of internationally renowned consultancies and producers in the form of the Association for Foreign Investment." Poland has an "Institute of Polish Brand," which is closely tied to the government and has worked with the British branding company, Saffron, for selling the country's image (Capik 2007, 156; Saffron 2008).
In this new universe, there seemingly is no end to the marketing of place and space. "The word brand excites a great deal of contentious discussion," says Wally Olins, chair of London-based Saffron Brand Consultants, who prefers the term "reputation management" - as if that were less contentious (Olins 2005). Anholt, who was a PR specialist for Hill and Knowlton in Budapest and London and more recently a British business university lecturer, contends rather directly that nation branding or reputation management in Central and Eastern Europe turns on their capacity to institute neoliberal reforms as the basis for attracting foreign capital. He asserts that: "Having a country brand is necessary to attract investors but not enough; there must be an infrastructure, a skilled workforce, favourable tax policies and returns on investment," and that
for countries whose image is better than reality (Poland, Czech Republic, or Romania), the challenge is to transform their superior image into concrete investment projects while the countries that score higher on reality than image (Hungary, for example) should improve their perception in the market and level of notoriety.
Even better, he offers, the Czech Republic would be well served to change the English version of its name to make it easier for foreigners to vocalize. Estonia, too, would be better off if it adopted the German name Estland (for its association with high-ranking Finland on the attractiveness scale) (cited in Szondi 2007).
Who better to advise countries on integrating neoliberal "reforms" than people who work both sides of the aisle, the public and the private sector? Indeed, hundreds of former politicians and government officials have gotten in on the act, working as lobbyists, consultants, PR flacks, or other kinds of agents for foreign clients. Their easy seguey into such promotional occupations makes fiction of traditional distinctions between public and private sector activities. Former presidential candidate Robert Dole was a lobbyist for the UAE in the United States. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright served as a lobbyist for the UAE in China. And former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, both represented U.S. transnational corporations doing business in China. Former New York City mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was hired as a consultant for the Mexican government. Richard Gephardt ended a 28-year year career in Congress, including a period as majority leader, to become a Wall Street consultant. Discredited former attorney-general John Ashcroft left the Bush administration in 2005 to start a K-Street lobbying firm, plying his background contacts in the Justice department and Homeland Security to private companies, including a credit data firm, ChoicePoint (Rich 2006,208). Tom Daschle, former U.S. Senate majority leader, was paid millions to parlay his connections to government to get favorable treatment for his clients in the health care industry. Trent Lott, another former Republican Senate majority leader, left the Senate with $1.3 million left in his reelection fund and started a lobbying firm. One of his first clients was Northrop Grumman, which was then seeking to protect its $35 billion government contract (Attkisson 2008).
These are just of a few of the many federal employees and officials who have passed through the revolving door to assume second careers as well-paid hired hands for foreign interests in the United States and abroad. "Of the 198 members who left Congress since 1998 [to 2005] and are eligible to lobby, 43.4 percent ended up in the influence industry" (Public Citizen 2005, 6). From 2005 to early 2008, another 195 members of Congress left government to take up lobbying careers (Attkisson 2008), including former populist progressives like Richard Gephardt, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 under a campaign strategy of fighting lobbyists. Gephardt is now a lobbyist himself, whose firm's clients include Goldman Sachs (against financial institution reform), Visa (against credit card industry regulation), for state infrastructure privatization (toll roads), Peabody Energy ("clean coal"), PhRMA (the pharmaceutical drug cartel), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Oones 2009, 21-24). Running for president, Barack Obama promised to shut the revolving door of business and politics, but as president, he too appointed big corporate lobbyists to be part of his administration and cabinet.
The greater integration of politicians and state administrators into corporate practice represents a maturation of capitalism. It is an age in which everything, including the public sphere and its representatives, are subject to its commodifying grip. In Marxian structural analysis, the state carries out three essential functions: capital accumulation (assisting in the production of wealth), legitimation (inducing consent among the non-elite majority who are most subject to its control), and coercion (creation and enforcement of legal authority). Propaganda relates to all of these state functions but in particular legitimation. In an information-intensive economy, such as it is, the mode of persuasion becomes a more central form of production, which requires propaganda arts to take on added significance.
Indeed, the new capacities to conduct surveillance of citizens and store, process, and massage and merge data on citizens has given greater emphasis to the management of "public opinion" in propaganda campaigns compared to past practices in traditional diplomacy. As one specialist on propaganda has noted:
Through the use of modern instruments and techniques of communications it is possible today to reach large or influential segments of national populations - to inform them, to influence their attitudes, and at times perhaps even to motivate them to a particular course of action .... [and] by appealing over the heads of governments directly to public opinion, effective propaganda and other measures would encourage popular opinion to support U.S. policies, which would in turn exert pressure on government policymakers (Osgood 2001).
One of the leading political and commercial surveillance organizations, Aristotle Inc., is said to have a database on 175 million Americans. Many major U.S. political campaigns, mostly Republican, including those of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani, as well as many other Senate, House, and gubernatorial candidates have paid for Aristotle's voter data. Aristotle counts among the commercial clients for its voter lists major financial enterprises, such as U.S. Bancorp (Verini 2007). These surveillance data are available to foreign clients as well, though one wonders if the government of a country such as Cuba would be an acceptable customer. An ally, Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko availed himself of its services for use in the 2004 election. But its client base does not end with politics.
The informational mode of development and its technological infrastructure is an artifact of the restructuring within the neoliberal economy that requires them for the assertion and maintenance of domestic and international power. This economy provides the systemic basis of the transition to a propaganda society and its promotional foreign policy. In Chapter 2, I turn to the historical foundations of these developments within the United States. The idea of democracy is both a great promise and a great pretense. The struggle for its capture remains open, but a popular form of democracy has long been suppressed by the supervening necessities of organized wealth, which continue to impose neoliberal economic assumptions on its meaning. The term "democracy" thus becomes a handmaid of corporate capital, whose power is sustained not only by the control of resources and the domination of the political process but also through the popular internalization of belief in its inevitable, advanced, and progressive character.
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Notes:1. The culture of marketing is central to both formal and informal enterprises. In the film, "The Girlfriend Experience," a young New York City prostitute is confronted by the reality that one's image is everything in getting ahead, which requires among other marketing devices a competitive web presence to lure customers. Prostitution is thus routinized by the same standard disciplinary practices, during both upswings and downturns, as any other business venture.
2. Among its several known breaches of privacy rights, Acxiom Corporation proposed to the U.S. Department of Justice in November 2001 to carry out an Internet surveillance for websites dealing with such political issues as abortion, white power, religion, immigration, and foreign policy and to provide contact information from such sites. In 2003, Acxiom was found to have passed along personal information on millions of Jet Blue and other airline customers, without notification, to a firm doing an anti-terrorism study for the Department of Defense (Gunn 2006).
3. Lippmann wrote in The Phantom Public that the notion of the public was "an abstraction" and "a mere phantom": "The public must be put in its place so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd" (cited in Snow 2003, 66).
4 Symbolic language is a central part of propaganda. Germany's Nazi movement (National Socialists) appropriated the then popular term "socialist" to impose a brutally authoritarian, militarist, and racist society, not to free people from the control of state and corporate power. "Liberty" and "freedom" were commonly part of the nomenclature of elitist organizations, often supported by the CIA, in opposition to progressive labor unions and other left-leaning organizations. Reagan called the counter-revolutionaries his administration illegally supported in Nicaragua "freedom fighters," and a missile system designed for first strike capability against the Soviet Union was called the "peacekeeper." "Free markets" are those that are open to control by international capital, not for small or local businesses. "Revolution," when used by the right, generally refers to a conservative political order. Corporations use the term "revolution," as in "communications revolution," not for the purpose of social liberation, but, in the name of technological and social progress, to impose a more regimented economic order involving millions of job losses and deskilling undertaken for increased profitability in the name of "efficiency."
5. In their otherwise brilliant analysis of media propaganda, Herman and Chomsky surprisingly paid little attention in the later edition of their book, Manufacturing Consent (2002), to the positive and negative uses of new technologies, such as the ways that corporate broadcasting and print outlets have employed telecommunications and digital systems to drastically reduce staff journalists and thereby their coverage of world events and also the alternative ways that dissidents have appropriated electronic media.
6. The term "public opinion" has to be treated skeptically (hence the quotation marks around it), because the opinions that the media typically report are based on questions that originate with mainstream media, not the public. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that the public can never properly voice opinions about state policy inasmuch as the media create a "pseudoreality of stereotypes and emotional impressions" that mislead proper public understanding of the issues (Snow 2003, 32).
7. Although Britain has followed many of the commercial directions of the United States, its BBC public service oriented broadcasting system remains the dominant radio and television transmitter in the country. Unlike the BBC, which became a chartered public medium in 1927, NBC and CBS radio went on the air the same year as commercial (promotional) national networks.
8. The term is said to be have been coined in 1967 by then dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy Edmund Guillon, a former State Department official, and an outspoken defender of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Public diplomacy is actually not diplomacy at all, as it is targeted to ordinary citizens, not diplomats. University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy senior fellow John Brown, cites Guillon's own description of public diplomacy: "To describe the whole range of [international] communications, information, and propaganda, we hit upon 'public diplomacy' (Brown 2004).
9. Based on an empirical assessment of political consultants' views, Richard M. Perloff and Dennis Kinsey found that the key strategy of political persuasion is to appeal to the emotions (cited in Kinsey 1999, 119) - not at all different from that of the Nazi propagandists - rendering politics as an exercise in visceral public management.
10. One is reminded of the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who said: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." On the matter of measures of democracy, the United States ranks extremely low on election turnouts, hovering around 50% in most recent elections, although the 2008 turnout was nearly 57% - the highest in 40 years. Of 172 countries measured by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance from 1945-2008, the United States ranked 139'\ with average turnouts below all the Western, Central, and Eastern European countries, as well as those in Central Asia (IDEA 2008). The United States is 51" in rankings of union membership (of 60 reporting) - only 7.6 percent of the private sector - far below almost all of these same countries (Swivel 2007).
11. One of the many abuses of spin was the campaign tactics used on behalf of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms by the consultant Alex Castellanos, who incited racial fear in voters against the African-American challenger Harvey Gantt with his "white hands" political ad in 1990. In 2000, Castellanos did an attack ad against Al Gore, running the word "rats" across the screen image of the presidential candidate for a brief moment to try to achieve a subliminal effect. For all his notoriety, Castellanos is treated as a respectable and regular guest commentator on CNN.
12. Although the use of the Internet is growing rapidly in political campaigning, television ranks as the top source for reaching voters. Targeting voters through video ads has become more of a science over time (Kinsey 1999,119). In the 2007-2008 election cycle, spending on political advertising spending was projected to break records at $2.5 billion.